A Queer Warld

John Buchan (1875–1940) is remembered today as the creator of Richard Hannay, gentleman spy and hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and other adventures. Although his pacy thrillers remain Buchan’s best-known work, it was the short fiction located in the Borders countryside that first established him as a master of suspense and storytelling. Introduced by Robert Hume, A Queer Warld collects four of Buchan’s short stories in one volume: ‘The Herd of Standlan’, ‘On Cademuir Hill’, ‘At the Rising of the Waters’, and ‘Skule Skerry’. In each, the landscape and the elements are powerful presences, driving the characters’ moral and spiritual dilemmas as they face their different dangers.